We’re thrilled to welcome Di-Ann Eisnor to Meetup’s Board of Directors. Di-Ann is currently VP Platform & Partnerships for crowd-sourced navigation and real-time traffic start-up, Waze. Di-Ann has a longstanding history with Meetup. She was friends with Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman in 2001, when the idea for Meetup was born. Di-Ann has been attending and organizing Meetups herself since 2004, and thinks Meetup is more important now than ever. “Meetup touches a very basic human need and desire, that’s global, that’s human. People are busier, more distant from one another now, even in the quietest corners of the world. The bringing together of humans around interests is important,” she tells us. “It’s never been a more important time for people to get together with people of like minds.”

Di-Ann believes in the mission of Meetup, and shares our excitement about Meetup’s future. “I think Meetup is poised to have the fastest growth it’s ever had,” she says. “Meetup has not even scratched the surface in terms of it’s potential growth, particularly in a mobile world, in a world where community is standard and expected and people are open to it.”

Prior to Waze, Di-Ann was Co-Founder and CEO of Platial, a widely adopted mobile and online social mapping service funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ram Shriram and others. Di-Ann holds a BS in Studio Art and Business Administration from New York University.

Dale Choonoolal has a mantra when it comes to his Meetup, NYC Soccer: “Always focus on doing the right thing on the field.” Every weekend, Dale’s members do just that. They get together to hang out, play some soccer, and dig into some post game brunch.

When Dale started NYC Soccer in 2008, he was looking to meet new people and build a business around his love of sports and the outdoors. By every measure, he’s succeeded. Today, NYC Soccer has more than 4,000 members and Dale is making seventy five thousand dollars per year. On top of that, Dale has met some of his closest friends through his Meetup.

Edie Driskill created her Meetup the afternoon before a big dance conference hundreds of miles from her home in Columbus Ohio. The next day, while she was dancing away, her phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. Every few minutes, Meetup sent her an email about another new member of her group, Country Done Right. By the time she got home, there were more than a dozen dancers waiting to dance with her.

As many of you know by now, a major bug, now known as “Heartbleed” was discovered in the popular open source library OpenSSL this week, affecting hundreds of thousands of companies across the internet. We pride ourselves on being open and honest with our community, so we want to make sure to keep you all in the loop about where exactly Meetup stands vs. Heartbleed.

Meetup was probably not impacted, but you should change your password to be safe.

It’s unlikely that any information on Meetup was compromised. That said, add Meetup to your list of passwords to change because it only takes a minute, and unfortunately we can’t say confidently that we’re 10000% in the clear.

If you’re curious to know more:

Meetup runs a version of the OpenSSL software that was not vulnerable to “Heartbleed.” That being said, one of our vendors, Cloudflare, was impacted by the Heartbleed bug, and while it’s unlikely that Meetup was vulnerable as a result, it’s hard to know for sure.

Cloudflare introduced a patch before the bug was common knowledge, so everything is now secure.

Bottom line: it’s a best practice, internet-wide, to change your passwords on a regular basis. Given the excitement of this week, now is a good time to change yours on Meetup. It’ll take you less time than reading this blog post – we promise! Just head to your Account page, and click “edit”.

If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you’ll notice that we’ve got a new look and a new destination. Now when you visit blog.meetup.com, you’ll find stories from the Meetup community- the Organizers and Members who have built 150,000 Meetup Groups together, and the team at Meetup HQ that gets to focus on a simple dream everyday.

If you were following our blog on Tumblr, you’ll notice more photos and quick hits in your feed. And if you weren’t following us on Tumblr, or Twitter, or Facebook, what are you waiting for?